Why Prime Video’s Reacher Will Never Adapt One Novel From The Book Series

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As such, it would not be surprising if Reacher’s future seasons end up adapting almost all of the 30 books in Child’s ongoing book series. However, while Reacher season 1 did adapt the first novel in the series, the show proceeded to jump around the book series without much regard for continuity. It currently seems vanishingly unlikely that any future Reacher season will adapt 2005’s Child novel One Shot, since this book was already made into an unrelated standalone movie starring Tom Cruise, Jack Reacher, back in 2012.

2005’s One Shot Was Already Made Into Tom Cruise’s 2012 Movie Jack Reacher

Directed by Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation‘s Christopher McQuarrie, Jack Reacher saw Cruise take on the role of the eponymous drifter in a standalone story where Reacher is called on to investigate a mass shooting thought to be committed by a former elite military sniper. Jack Reacher earned largely positive reviews upon release and proved a box office success, earning $218 million on a budget of only $60 million. With stellar supporting roles for Robert Duvall, Werner Herzog, and Rosamund Pike, Jack Reacher is worth a watch, but fans of the novel series were less impressed than critics.

Cruise’s casting diverged substantially from the novel’s physical description of Reacher, and the movie made a handful of further major changes to the source story that ardent fans of Child’s books didn’t care for. 2013’s sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, was less successful with critics and at the box office, bringing Cruise’s take on the character to an end. This means that One Shot, the 12th story in the book series, already has an existing adaptation, so Prime Video’s show is unlikely to ever revisit the same familiar story for a second time.

Reacher Implied That One Shot Already Happened Between Seasons 1 and 2

With so many more Reacher books to adapt, it would not make much sense for a future season of Reacher to revisit a well-worn plot that already has a separate movie adaptation. So far, the show has only brought book 1, Killing Floor (in season 1), book 14, Bad Luck and Trouble (in season 2), and book 11, Persuader (in season 3), to the screen. This means the series still has enough material for a further 25 seasons without revisiting 2013’s Never Go Back or One Shot.

Furthermore, Reacher already addressed the story of One Shot within the show’s canon. In season 2, Reacher confirmed that the events of One Shot took place offscreen after season 1, meaning the absence of this novel already has an existing in-universe explanation within the continuity of the Prime Video series. This makes it doubly unlikely that Prime Video’s Reacher will ever reach into the franchise’s past to rehash this story once more.